How Small Businesses Are Preparing for the Holidays

Most small businesses are gearing up for the holiday season. Whether this is an extremely busy time for your business, or not, there are many efforts you can make to drum up some sales before the end of the year.

Below are some ideas that small businesses incorporate into their holiday marketing plan. Use these resources to your advantage if you need some inspiration, or come up with your own innovative twist.

Increase your email Acquisition

Email is one of the most effective methods for alerting your audience about holiday sales. In order to maximize the potential of email marketing leading up to Cyber Monday or Black Friday, small business marketers should update their email signup forms and provide extra incentive for users to submit their email address.
Gabriel Shaoolian, BlueFountainMedia.com

31 Days of Magic

One of the biggest ways my business celebrates the holiday season is by holding a “31 Days of Magic at MyCorporation” month for December, where each day we schedule a fun activity for everyone on our staff to participate in and a big holiday party midway through the month too! We do a little bit of everything from a gingerbread house contest to Hanukkah cookies to decorating the office tree and bringing in presents for the local Toys for Tots drive. It’s a lot of fun for everyone and every day is different!
Deborah Sweeney, MyCorporation.com

Prepare Inventory

I take a look at my inventory to see what items I have in stock for making gift baskets and chocolate arrangements. It’s best if I can have these items on hand ahead of time to take some of the stress out of a busy season. I also like to start thinking about what molds I may be using and seeing if there are new items out. I like to keep my products unique and am always on the look out for the next thing that can help me stand out.
Christopher Weck, Sinful Sweets Chocolate Company

Create Relevant Christmas Landing Pages

To prepare for Xmas we’ve created a specific landing page which shows all the available house sitting opportunities worldwide – making it easier for our customers and saving them time. Start now with your PR – there is a lot of competition at this time of year – your Christmas themed landing page will help here too. Send relevant and timely information to all your key press – many publications are writing about Christmas now due to lead times for publications etc.
Rachel Martin, TrustedHouseSitters.com

Giveaways

For the holiday season, we are providing a complimentary digital holiday recipe book, which will include recipes for Hanukkah, Christmas and Thanksgiving. We also will call upon our readers to submit their own holiday recipes to feature them on our website during the holiday season. In addition to the recipe book giveaway, we are having a Pamper Yourself Holiday Shopping Spree Giveaway, where one lucky person can enter to win a $100 Visa Gift Card!GrammaGood.com

1 Comment

Carissa, great idea for a post, I like how you took the opportunity to see what your market does to prepare for the holidays. Good job. Now would be a really good time for small business owners to think about the stress of working retail during the holidays and plan to appreciate their employees, similar to MyCorporation.com. Let each employee know you appreciate their hard work and try to catch them working well with customers and compliment them. Thanks!